Figuring out who’s hot at the Olympics is like figuring out what girl at the Playboy mansion is going to be the next centerfold. They all look good, but who’s going to get the nod. Yes, I am a Playboy connoisseur. If you are not, please ignore the rest of this article, slap yourself in the face with your laptop, and go get a copy. You are truly missing out on amazing writing. Really, I read it for the articles. Yuuuup.
Ok, now that we’ve established I’m a complete liar, lets get down to business. Deciding which NBA player is hot just depends on the day. One day Melo drops 37-points and the next day everyone’s talking about how Nicolas Batum loves to punch his opponent’s in the family jewels. I decided to take a quantitative approach (that’s numbers ya’ll) on my Who’s-Hot-O-Meter.
My method of analysis will rely on good old twitter. I think I can call twitter old because it has been around since 2006, which pretty much makes it ancient by modern tech standards. According to the great OZ of twitter, the most tweeted about NBA player is LeBron James with 506,804 tweets. Second place goes to Kevin Durant with 276,729. Note, the athlete with the most tweets is Michael Phelps with 774,510, but let's keep in mind he’s won, like, 100 medals already.
It’s easy to understand why Lebron and Durant are a hot item this Olympics. Both are coming off of their NBA Finals showdown. Durant’s the 3-time NBA scoring champion, and LeBron is the season and finals MVP. It may shock some die-hard Laker fans to see that Kobe is not very popular in the land of Twitter this summer, but tweets don’t lie. Even Kobe’s magnificent performance in the quarterfinals and all his scandalous photos with Australian field hockey players, Dutch divers, and Swedish swimmers haven’t helped him break into the top five.
No foreign NBA players have been super hot, but we should definitely give a nod to the Gasol brothers for being one of the major conversation points to every “How to beat team U.S.A.” conversation. Also hot are Argentine’s Manu Ginobili and France’s Tony Parker; both are San Antonio Spurs and both are hot for different reasons. Manu’s getting more attention for his play, while no one can stop talking about Parker’s goggles (think James Worthy, but with a French accent).
This is officially the first social media Olympics and the NBA players are helping to lead the charge into twitter, tumbler, and facebook history. LeBron’s king of the mountain, as it appears 2012 is the year of The King in all things that matter. And OMG! Yes, this totally matters.
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